Painters' Daily Lives Come to Light in Show
 Istra Pacheco - Associated Press
| | A couple of never before seen drawings are seen on display at the home and now the Frida Kahlo museum in Mexico City. The museum is preparing to show an exhibit of drawings, dresses, photos and letters that were found in the museum in several sealed crates that were ordered to remain closed for years, by orders of her husband, artist Diego Rivera. On July 6, the exhibit will open to the general public. (AP/Dario Lopez-Mills) |
To commemorate 100 years since her birth, Frida Kahlo's Mexico City family home-turned-museum will display clothing, drawings, photographs and tidbits of the eccentric artist's daily life.
The items were found inside trunks and in an unused bathroom three years ago and have never before been shown publicly.
The Treasures of the Blue House, Frida and Diego will open to the public at the Blue House on July 6, marking Kahlo's birthday in 1907. The collection of 22,105 documents, 5,387 photos, more than 6,000 magazines and books and 179 pieces of clothing aims to dispel myths about the painter's life, the museum's director Hilda Trujillo announced Thursday.
"With this discovery we can get to know Frida more as an intellectual. We see that she was deeply creative, studious," Trujillo said. "You see scientific research in her work which is backed up by the large amount of medical books that we discovered with papers and markings she had made inside them."
Most of the material was locked away in trunks and cabinets that were covered in tape and dispersed throughout the Blue House. Her husband, renowned muralist Diego Rivera, left instructions asking the caretakers of his trust not to open the trunks and cabinets until 15 years after his death in 1957.
But Mexican society woman, Dolores Olmedo, left them closed, believing the material could contain personal information that would compromise the couple's image, said her son, Carlos Phillips Olmedo, who runs several museums, including the Blue House. Curators opened the trunks and cabinets in 2004, a year after Dolores Olmedo died.
The collection includes corsets that Kahlo used to support her back, which was fractured in a bus accident when she was a young girl.
It reflects snippets of her daily life, including a trolley car ticket with a scribbled note by Kahlo and a napkin marked with a lipstick kiss, along with letters from European artists and 102 never-before-seen drawings by Kahlo.
Curators also found 30 photos of her father, Guillermo Kahlo, that he had taken of himself, possibly giving inspiration to Kahlo's self portraits that she used to deal with the accident, her tumultuous marriage and her inability to have children.
"It's an archive that is full of life . . . from the kisses shown in the photos to the notes scribbled on the back of them," curator Pablo Ortiz said. "It exudes her."
Her life has inspired several plays and films, including the 2002 movie Frida starring Salma Hayek.
As part of the commemoration, Mexico City's Palacio de Bellas Artes will display some 350 works, including 50 letters written by Kahlo, more than 100 photos of the artist and a collection of paintings being shown for the first time. The show, which runs through Aug. 19, also includes talks on the artist's life and her influence in politics and the arts. |
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Vallarta Living | Art Talk | June 2007 
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